Monday, September 9, 2013

The
Madison World Music Festival
celebrates its tenth anniversary, Sept. 19-21 on the Memorial Union Terrace and at the Willy Street
Fair. The new decade’s starting to look
eerily like the last one. The very first Fest
came a year into the Iraq War, which Dick Cheney had promised would last only “weeks.” As I go to post this year's Gringa's Guide another mad dog White
House is spewing flimsy pretexts for a new shock and awe campaign, this time
against Syria. Assad's as evil as any dictator or terrorist we've taken down lately, but do we really have to rule the world? Are we about to drop bombs on yet another failed state,
over the objections of “the American people” and a slew of prominent Congressional Republicans (say what??) Will Assad retaliate? Or will Putin's plan to put Assad's chemicals under international control kill the craziness before it hits the fan? And are chemical weapons really the crux of this situation? By the time you read this you may know the answers. But while
the drums of war beat belligerently in Washington, drums from sundry spots around
the globe serve up dance beats for us. At
the Madison World Music Festival you can literally feel – with your body, with
your feet – the rhythms of the long, shifting history of cultural and economic
connections that circle the earth. The moral of this story? Make dance, not war.

I really like this year’s lineup, and here’s
why. World music is fusion by nature. The term itself is a commercial umbrella for a
species of alt-pop that fuses “ethnic” or “folk” sounds with modern production
techniques. Also, nations aren’t
isolates; the “traditional” forms on which world music’s based are like
sponges, absorbing new influences over centuries of political, economic and
religious change. A lot of world music
springs from this historical logic, though the latest phenom is altermodern
sounds.Altermodernism's a hip new
buzzword for the Millennial mashup of socioeconomic globalization and aesthetic
universalism. Some altermodern world music is sleek and sophisticated, though most of it's best described as spurious
syntheses of roots-related sounds laid over rock or hip hop beats. Last year's fest had a few too many Celtic-cumbia-reggaeton-flamenco-let’s-party-baby uber-fusions, which I'm happy to report are MIA on this year's bill. Take a
look.

Thursday,
Sept. 19, Memorial Union Terrace:

5 PM The Chitravina N. Ravikiran Quartetoffers
an opening meditation. Ravikiran – guru, teacher, composer, master musician –
was born in Karnataka, southwest India, in 1967 – the same year the late Ravi
Shankar was teaching Beatle George Harrison to play the sitar, which introduced
the Hippie Generation to Indian music.Shankar
was a master of northern, Hindustani music, which, like its southern
counterpart, Carnatic music, is a classical form that emerged from an ancient
pan-Indian sound sometime in the Middle Ages.The two sound similar to my untrained ear – I’m at a loss to
describe the difference.But Ravikiran’s
instrument is the chitravina, which only loosely resembles the more guitarlike
sitar. A fretless, lute-like instrument with three layers of
strings, for melody, resonance, and drone, the chitravina's played with a slide, like a
Hawaiian steel guitar or a dobro.Though
Ravikiran plays a plugged-in version the sound is soft, and in Sanskrit, Carnatic
means “soothing to the ears.” It’s modal
and droning, with emphasis on the subtle values between the notes of its many
seven-note scales.Big Apple-based alto
sax player Rudresh Mahanthappa, whose family emigrated to the States from south
India, experiments with Carnatic scales. Mahanthappa’s music sounds a lot different
than Ravikiran’s, but the latter’s approach is similarly experimental – he’s
developed an East / West blend of Carnatic melody and European harmony he calls
“Melharmony,” which opens up the concept of Carnatic collaborations
with jazz, blues and western symphonic ensembles.

7 PM From the land of
saunas, Nokia phones, the all-cello heavy metal band Apocalyptica, and one of
the best public education systems in the world – that would be Finland – comes Kardemimmit,
a four-woman ensemble playing their own tunes, deeply deeply rooted in Finnish folk
traditions.Even the name of this band
is folksy – an amalgam of kardemumma (cardemom, used in a recipe for
atraditional Finnish bread) and mimmit, Finnish for “girls.” They play zither-like, diatonic-tuned kanteles
– modern versions of a folk instrument descended from an an ancient mythological harp made from the jawbone of a giant pike and hairs from the tail of a stallion owned by a pagan hero-chief.Kardemimmit’s soft sound evokes snow and mist that seems worlds away from the ebullient Finnish / Norwegian “Nordgrass” fiddle band Frigg, which played the MWMF in
2011.

9 PMChristine Salem, from Réunion
Island, tours her new release, Salem
Tradition, on the Cobalt label. What she sings is moloya – voice-and-percussion, spirit possession music, polyrhythmic and percussive.
Réunion, a French “overseas department” that
sits some 586 miles off the east coast of Madagascar, was uninhabited before
the French claimed it in the seventeenth century.In the eighteenth century the colonial overlords brutally
removed Africans from Mozambique and Madagascar to work cane and coffee
plantations on Réunion, which makes moloya African diaspora music.In the mid-twentieth century the Catholic
Church banned moloya, calling it “devil’s music” – ostensibly for its heathen
nature, but more concretely because it was being used as a symbol of cultural
identity and a rallying cry for political autonomy by the Communist Party of Réunion
Island.Separatist fervor died down, and
the ban was lifted, in the 1980s – but moloya’s still mostly a male domain. Christine Salem’s an edgy, feminist rebel, belting modern moloya – her own compositions, with lyrics that lie outside the music’s
main spiritual intent – in her bluesy, powerhouse, contralto voice.

Friday, Sept. 20, Memorial
Union Terrace:

5 PMBaladino, a quintet of
talented young musicians with ethnomusicologists’ ears, cooks up spunky,
rhythmic Jewish music from the melting pot that is modern Israel.Lead singer Yael Badash, whose star potential
shines bright, sings in Ladino, the mother tongue of Sephardic Jews (Sefarad is
the Hebrew name for Spain).Like its Eastern European, Ashkenazi counterpart, Yiddish, Ladino's an endangered language thanks to the Holocaust and Israel’s emphasis on
Hebrew. By some accounts only 200,000
Jews worldwide, among them just 50,000 Israelis, still speak it. Baladino’s part of a youth-driven roots movement
to revive this potpourri of a language, rooted in Medieval Spanish and Hebrew
but expanded when the Sephardim were expelled from their homeland in 1492, the
year Spain was united under the Catholic monarchy.During the diaspora Ladino acquired new linguistic twists in North Africa, southeast Europe and the
Middle East.All of these influences
spice Baladino’s soup, and notes of Eastern European klezmer flavor (without the accordian) simmer subtly in the mix.

7 PMThe Krar Collective – a music and dance
outfit from Ethiopia via the UK, which gained fame when it played at the London
Olympics – approaches the North Africa / Middle East overlap from an entirely
different cultural perspective. Ethiopia's the cradle of Christian history in
Africa; Orthodox Christianity became the official religion of the Ethiopian
Kingdom of Aksum in the fourth century AD.In
the seventh century, Muslims fleeing persecution in the Middle East found
refuge in Aksum, where they paid tribute to Ethiopian kings until the
bloody Muslim / Christian wars of the sixteenth century nearly destroyed the
region.Today a half-Christian,
half-Muslim, post-colonial, post-Marxist hotbed of human rights abuses,
Ethiopia – a landlocked nation on the Horn of Africa – straddles the cultural
line between the Middle East and Africa, and that’s exactly what the Krar
Collective sounds like.The band’s lead instrument
is the krar harp, used since Medieval times by Azmari minstrels who entertained
the Christian royal court and later the secular patrons of traditional
Ethiopian drinking establishments.The
Krar Collective, which usually performs as a trio featuring the eponymous harp,
double-headed kebero drums, and one powerful chanteuse, rocks a
plugged-in version of traditional Azmari music.

9 PMNomadic
Massive
– an eight-member, socially conscious, international hip-hop “superfam” from
Montreal, ends the night.The tunes that wind through Nomadic Massive’s hip-hop beats reflect the origins of the French, English, Arabic, Spanish, and Haitian Creole speakers who compose the collective. This soulful,
polyglot species of altermodern rap doesn’t have a lot of “let’s
party baby” in its often pointedly political lyrics, and its post-earthquake youth development hip-hop workshops in Haiti, plus similar projects in Havana and Sao Paolo, put social action behind its words. Being a Boomer I never expect to enjoy hip-hop, but Blitz the Ambassador, from Ghana and New York, blew me away at the 2011 MWMF with his mighty hip-hop soul music,
imbued with sizzling activist messages and musical influences ranging from
Coltrane to James Brown. From the few YouTube videos I watched I don't know if I'll fall for Nomadic Massive or not, but if you're younger than me you probably will.

Saturday, Sept. 21,
Willy Street Fair:

1:30 PM The Prusinowski Trio, usually composed
of four or five players despite the name, opens, with a set of rousing Polish
folk tunes – dance music rooted in Renaissance-era peasant festivities.These tunes – which may or may not have
retained relics of more ancient, Slavic sounds – were adopted in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries by the royal court in Krakow, and stylized into
classical mazurkas, polonaises, and waltzes by Frederick Chopin in the 1800s. The members of the Prusinowski Trio – highly
accomplished, urban players who learned the music of Poland’s central villages
at the side of old-time masters – return these forms to their roots, but with a
very contemporary, Euro-arts edge. Of course, Poland's got one of Europe's fastest-growing economies -- even its pastoral countryside, where farmers till the soil and grandmas patiently stuff pierogi with potatoes, is getting
fracked, and the kids live for hip-hop and Krakow's hot alt-rock scene. The Prusinowski Trio’s not just a band -- it's a cutting-edge instrument of cultural survival, updating
traditional music to save it from extinction.

3:30 PM While the
Prusionowski Trio plays deep roots world music, from Poland’s neighbor to the
east – the Ukraine – comes a thoroughly altermodern outfit that happens to be
one of the most interesting acts in this year’s lineup – DakhaBrakha, a one man, three
woman quartet.DakhaBrakha marries an
avant-garde musical interpretation of the Ukraine’s pre-Soviet national heritage, which
owes much to the Cossacks – the fierce horsemen of the Eurasian Steppe – with the
whole wide world. Other Millennial Ukranian bands take a similar approach,
though DakhaBrakha seems farther out than most. Its members wear tall, deconstructed Cossack
hats and ply a panoply of traditional and modern instruments, from zgaleyka
(Ukranian bagpipes, I think – this one was hard to track down) and garmosha
(Russian accordion) to didgeridoo, djembe, tabla, cello, piano, and trombone.Their repertory includes a trancelike Euro-Motown sound, complete with falsetto lead singing (by the guy), and a
female backup chorus, plus a kind of Afro-Cossack tribal chant, and songs with
catchy accordion riffs and djembe drums done in straight-up call-and-response –
the Ukraine meets Africa in the altermodern universe. It’s the most unlikely blue-eyed quasi-soul
music imaginable, but it’s surprisingly satisfying.

5:30 PM Tal
National,
a guitar-driven band (six musicians, one dancer) from Niger’s fast-growing
capital city of Niamey, has some big hits in its homeland and is celebrating
its debut international release (Kaani, just out on Fat Cat Records).Niger’s borders are
essentially those of the former French Colonie du Niger, carved from an inland chunk of West Africa where the southern edge of the Sahara meets the Sahel in first half of the twentieth century. The French still support Nigerien politicians who
protect its economic interests, and Niger’s most valuable world-market resource
is, um, uranium, which the French exploit. Niger subsumes swaths of Songhai, Fulani, Hausa and Tuareg tribal
territories, and members of these groups bring their beats to Tal
National.But this is no rootsy, folksy
sound. Niamey, the economic, political and cultural hub of modern Niger, is a mushrooming
West African city, and and Tal National plays hard-driving, urban, pan-West
African music; tribal rhythms sizzle in a high-energy matrix of Nigerian Afrobeat,
Ghanain highlife and Senegalese mbalax, or melt into the plaintiveness of
Mali’s Tuareg desert blues.

7:30 PMThe last act on the Willy St. stage is Cristina Pato and the Migrations Band.Pato’s a virtuoso bagpiper, and wildly
accomplished classical and world musician (she’s a member of YoYo Ma’s Silk
Road Ensemble, and she’s collaborated with Arturo O’Farrill, Paquito D’Rivera
and Chick Corea, among other luminaries).Pato’s gallega – a native of Galicia,
the partly autonomous Spanish province on the northwest corner of the Iberian
peninsula that sits right above Portugal. Galicia shares an ancient Celtic
heritage with other regions of northwest Europe, including, of course, Ireland –
and in fact bagpipes may have originated in Galicia, where they’re called gaita; the earliest bagpipes known are depicted in a medieval Galician manuscrit,
the Cantigas de Santa María. Most Galician world music today sounds a lot like Gaelic Storm, cashing in on the Irish craze -- but what Pato plays with her Migrations band is wild, open-ended jazz fusion that's partly Celtic with a Spanish tinge.

Saturday, Sept. 21,
Memorial Union Terrace:

9:30 PMJoan
Soriano, El Duque de Bachata, who capped the MWMF in 2010, does so again
this year. Bachata, hugely popular dance music in its native Dominican Republic
and among Latin dance fantics everywhere, is sometimes called amargue – bitterness – because its
lyrics tend toward love and loss.But
bachata emerged in the explosion of euphoria that accompanied the assassination
of strongman Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the little country occupying the
eastern end of Hispaniola from 1930 to 1961.With Trujillo gone, boisterous backyard
parties (“bachatas”) broke out all over the poor black rural communities of
the Dominican Republic, with food, drink, and a few musicians – a guitarist, a
bongocero, somebody on maracas – on hand.From there, bachata, an Antillean fusion in 4/4 time that takes cues
from older guitar-based, Afro-Spanish genres – Dominican merengue but also
Cuban bolero and Cuban son, plus Puerto Rican plena – spread to the bars and
whorehouses of Santo Domingo’s shantytowns. When I started dancing Latin at Mad City’s own
Cardinal Bar in the late 1970s bachata was music on the
margins of Dominican society, with no commercial machinery – nobody here knew
about it, though Dominican merengue was a big deal.It took a white, tech and media-savvy, university-educated
Dominican musician – Juan Luis Guerra – to connect bachata to the world, in
1990. Today, Millennial bachateros play New
Yorkified bachata de alto voltaje, hip-hop bachata, and of course bachatón. That’s definitively not Joan Soriano. He’s the real deal.He still lives in Santo Domingo. On his
latest ( I think) release, La Familia
Soriano (iASO Records, 2012), he’s accompanied by three of his siblings, though I don't know if they'll appear here. He
plays plugged in, and writes updated lyrics, sin machismo – but it’s pura
bachata, humble, melodic, encantadora, and irresistably bailable.